Journalist, editor, analyst and trainer on computing, government, climate and data
Other maps of the new NHS: local area teams (LATs); commissioning support units (CSUs); specialised commissioning hubs and clinical senates.
Replacing one that I had set up before NHS clinical commissioning groups properly existed, Guardian Healthcare Professionals Network has put live EHI Intelligence’s new CCG map, which I have compiled. It’s also available below. Continue reading “NHS CCG map: clinical commissioning groups on the web and on Twitter”
My automated Twitter feed of NHS news and comment pieces, @ImpatientNHS, now has 334 followers and has produced nearly 13,800 tweets (see here for an explanation of how it works).
On Thursday 25 July it tweeted 41 articles and posts, from obvious sources such as HSJ, the BBC and the Guardian, but also the Scottish edition of the Sun (‘NHS in death surge probe’), the Health Policy Insight blog (Alan Maynard on big pharma) and the Northern Echo (‘Support gathers for NHS rally in Darlington’). Continue reading “@ImpatientNHS service notice: any suggestions for more blogs and news?”
It’s great, unintentional timing to have an article about smart meters published in the middle of a heat wave. One of the justifications for putting smart meters in every home is that they manage demand, both by charging variable rates depending on time of day and also by turning down some appliances when demand is high. Doing this can dampen spikes in demand, stopping brownouts (a reduction in a local grid’s voltage) of the kind that have hit parts of the US during heatwaves.
The thing is, the main reason for US brownouts is the use of air conditioning. And as many people in Britain will be aware after the last fortnight, we don’t generally have air conditioning, at least not in homes (and although it has not felt like it during the last fortnight, we don’t really need it given our usual climate). This, I write in a piece on the subject for The Register published last Friday, is among the reasons why the UK government plan to put a smart meter in pretty much every home by 2020 may be flawed:
Firstly, many houses use gas for their big adjustable power needs, such as heating and cooking. Secondly, Britain’s clement climate keeps domestic power needs relatively low, whereas Norway (say) uses four times the electricity as Britain per person through heating, and Texas using five times due to air-conditioning. Continue reading “For The Register: is the government smart meters plan clever or dumb?”
Thorn started with a punk ethos of, we can do this ourselves. In 1980, her first band the Stern Bops provided a track to a compilation cassette sold for £1.50 through a couple of local record shops and an NME small ad; she recalls going to a tape copying facility in London to get more run off. The chapter is titled ‘DIY’.
Thorn and her partner Ben Watts formed the band Everything but the girl in 1982 at Hull University and continued until 2000. Despite this, she describes being a singer as “a job I wasn’t really cut out for” – she feels more comfortable writing and recording, and suffers periodically from stage fright. She uses this distance at some points of the book to assess pop music as a career option. Continue reading “Review: Bedsit disco queen, Tracey Thorn’s creative career advice book”
Salford Royal NHS foundation trust makes damaging fewer of its patients its priority (in other words, it aims to be safest trust in the NHS). But when visiting last week for the day job, I noted that ‘having a hospital that looks like a design hotel or art gallery’ had also been added to the to-do list.
Interviewing trust IT bosses for EHI Intelligence means visiting a lot of NHS hospitals. While special places in many ways, they tend to look functional rather than beautiful. As previously discussed, the new Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham is gleaming and full of light, like a really nice shopping mall. But while I knew Salford Royal was proud of its new Hope building – which was a construction site when I last visited two years ago (it opened in autumn 2011) – I wasn’t expecting it to be cool. Continue reading “Salford Royal Hope building: a hospital that looks like a design hotel/art gallery”
